I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog. It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned. It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.
The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level. Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.
You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with. Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces.
Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me. He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread. The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application. Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together. So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor.
I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design.
One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box. The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.
One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do. At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently. Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.
I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.
So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010 TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.
My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda selection. Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!” While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged for six sodas, but there were only four of us at the table. I would say that’s when this started for eateries he’s not familiar with.
I was talking a friend of mine this week and this thought came to me, why can’t we manage expectations like my son – find out before the order is placed. Find out what’s expected first then use the other bits of guidance to move forward. But how many times have we all paid way to much for something we thought was free on a project – me, plenty. This quote is going up in my work space, next to one I picked up from Corey Haines’ Software Craftsmanship talk at Open Agile Romania - “Work != Practice”. So if anyone else has gotten burnt, maybe check the menu, it will be in the area where the customer will pick two from the list of “Price, Quality, or Speed”. The refill policy should be listed just beneath that.
I stole that from the back of a T-shirt I saw at the Orlando Code Camp 2010. This was my first code camp and my first time volunteering for an event like this as well. It was an awesome day. I cannot begin to count the “aaahh”, “I did-not-know I could do that”, in the crowds and for myself. I think it was a great day of learning for everyone at all levels. All of the presenters were different and provided great insights into the topics they were presenting. Here’s a list of the ones that I attended.
KodeFuGuru, “Pirates vs. Ninjas”
He touched on many good topics to relax some of the ways we think when we are writing out code, and still looks good, readable, etc. As he pointed out in all of his examples, we might not always realize everything that’s going on under the covers. He exposed a bug in his own code, and verbalized the mental gymnastics he went through when he knew there was something wrong with one of his IEnumerable implementations. For me, it was great to hear that someone else labors over these gut reactions to code quickly snapped together, to the point that we rush to the refactor stage to fix what’s bothering us – and learn. He has some content on extension methods that was very interesting. My “that is so cool” moment was when he swapped out AddEntity method on an entity class and used a With extension method instead. Some of the LINQ scales fell off my eyes at that moment, and I realized my own code could be a lot more powerful (and readable) if incorporate a few of these examples at the appropriate times. And he cautioned as well… “don’t go crazy with this stuff”, there’s a place and time for everything. One of his examples demo’d toward the end of the talk is on his sight where he’s chaining methods together, cool stuff.
Quotes I liked:
“Extension Methods - Extension methods to put features back on the model type, without impacting the type.”
“Favor Declarative Code” – Check out the ? and ?? operators if you’re not already using them.
“Favor Fluent Code”
“Avoid Pirate Ninja Zombies! If you see one run!”
I’m definitely going to be looking at “Extract Projection” when I get into VS2010.
This guy had a whole host of gremlins against him, final score Sean 5, Gremlins 1. He ran the code samples from his github repo in the code github code viewer since the PC they school gave him to use didn’t have VS installed.
He did a great job of converting the grammar between BDD and TDD, and how this style of development can be used in integration tests as well as the different types of gated builds on a CI box – he didn’t go into a discussion around CI, but we could infer that it could work.
Like when we use WSSF, it does cause a class explosion to happen however the amount of code per class it limit to just covering the concern at hand – no more, no less. As in “When I as a <Role>, expect {something} to happen, because {}” This keeps us (the developer) from gold plating our solutions and creating less waste. He basically keeps the code that prove out the requirement to two lines of code. Nice.
He uses SpecUnit to merge this grammar into his .NET projects and gave an overview on how this ties into writing his own BDD tests. Some folks were familiar with Given / When / Then as story acceptance criteria and here’s how he mapped it: “Given <Context> When <Something Happens> Then <I expect...>” There are a few base classes and overrides in the SpecUnit framework that help with setting up the context for each test which looked very handy.
Successfully Running Your Own Coding Business
The speaker ran through a list of items that sounded like common sense stuff LLC, banking, separating expenses, etc. Then moved into role playing with business owners and an ISV. That was pretty good stuff, it pays to be a good listener all of the time even if your client is sitting on the other side of the phone tearing you head off for you – but that’s all it is, and get used to it its par for the course. Oh, yeah always answer the phone was one simple thing that you can do to move your business forward. But like Cory Foy tweeted this week, “If you owe me a lot of money, don’t have a message that says your away for five weeks skiing in Colorado.” Lots of food for thought that’s on my list of “todo’s and to-don’ts”.
Speaker Idol
Next, I had the pleasure of helping Russ Fustino tape this part of Code Camp as my primary volunteer opportunity that day. You remember Russ, “know the code” from the awesome Russ’ Tool Shed series. He did a great job orchestrating and capturing the Speaker Idol finals. So I didn’t actually miss any sessions, but was able to see three back to back in one setting. The idol finalists gave a 10 minute talk and very deep subjects, but different styles of talks. No one walked away empty handed for jobs very well done. Russ has details on his site. The pictures and video captured is supposed to be published on Channel 9 at a later date. It was also a valuable experience to see what makes technical speakers effective in their talks. I picked up quite a few speaking tips from what I heard from the judges and contestants.
If you are a great developer, you’re probably a lousy designer. Diane didn’t come to poke holes in what we think we can do with UI layout and design, but she provided some tools we can use to figure out metaphors for visualizing data. If you need help with that check out Silverlight Pivot – that’s what she was getting at. I was first introduced to her at one of John Papa’s talks last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and she’s very passionate about design. She was able to discuss different elements of Pivot, while to a developer is just looked cool. I believe she was providing the deck from her talk to folks after her talk, so send her an email if you’re interested. She says she can talk about design for hours and hours – we all left that session believing her.
Rinse and Repeat
Orlando Code Camp 2010 was awesome, and would totally do it again. There were lots of folks from my shop there, and some that have left my shop to go elsewhere. So it was a reunion of sorts and a great celebration for the simple fact that its great to be a developer and there’s a community that supports and recognizes it as well. The sponsors were generous and the organizers were very tired, namely Esteban Garcia and Will Strohl who were responsible for making a lot of this magic happen. And if you don’t believe me, check out the chatter on Twitter.